In an effort to bring some excitement to our incoming class and create user generated content, the Marketing team collaborated on a multi-media campaign to congratulate future UMassD students on their high school graduation.
First-year deposited students received a package in late May with a sticker to display their commitment to UMassD on their grad cap. 🎓
Fun fact: The sticker was designed by graphic design major Dylan Kelly ’22.
If you are using Terminalfour (T4), there is a good chance you are developing or maintaining content for a page or set of pages for the university’s site. The goal is typically to keep your readers on your site for as long as possible; maybe you have a conversion goal, such as having your visitors make a deposit, to enroll into an event, or apply to a program. While creating your content, hyperlinks guide your visitors to additional references and information to supplement their reading – but what happens when these links break? Some of even the biggest sites have broken links – the average number of broken links on any given site is 2.4% – but given their negative implications, we want to try to minimize them as much as possible.
A broken link is hyperlink that, when clicked, brings the visitor to an empty or non-existent webpage, resulting in a 404 error message. Here at UMass Dartmouth, we use a form of internal linking called section links to help prevent broken links between pages with the UMass Dartmouth site. We have less control over links to external sites that are owned by other individuals or organizations.
There are several issues with how broken links can affect your site, some more serious than others.
**Although not technically a “broken” link, domain name changes are still a common occurrence, and as a result, external links should be checked frequently. Domain names are often sold and the link that you once thought was going to one place could now link to completely different content.
References
Communications’ top five feature stories over April and May were:
University Marketing launches a redesign of the Student Life landing page.
The marketing efforts from our digital comms in SLATE saw great and very measurable success during this yield season. Most especially from the promotion of this year’s 3 live in person ASD events.
Our comm plan developed and written by enrollment marketing specialist Marissa Matton and executed by Timothy Murphy and Lindsey Costa saw 26 delivery(email) comms and 11 SMS (text messages) send out to our prospective attendees. The primary goal was to promote high registration and ultimately attendance numbers for the February 19th, March 20th, and April 23rd Admitted Students Days.
Shown below are charts displaying the 48hr bumps in registrants for each of the 3 live and in-person Admitted Students Days. Each bump directly correlates with
FEBRUARY 19
MARCH 20
APRIL 23
Communications Specialists have been concentrating student stories on “Commencement Spotlights” – highlighting soon-to-be graduates across all our colleges in a Q and A format so they can authentically summarize their experience at UMassD.
In an ever-persistent effort to enhance the website experience for the end user, similar changes that had applied to the Program and Course searches have also now been applied to the Online Directory as well.
Previously, one’s only options were to search by a name or department and click the corresponding “Search” button. Now, users are provided a field where they can enter data, or they can select from a number of filters. Either choice will return results below immediately. The improved search function and additional filters is providing higher volume of expected results.
Communications’ top five feature stories for February and March were:
How do you show the world all that our vibrant campus community has to offer when a pandemic’s been raging for 2 years and we’ve de-densified the campus to keep everyone safe? You get creative with photography!
Our photographers played with camera angles and depth of field to shoot subjects who were abiding by social distancing recommendations and mask-wearing.
And since returning to campus last fall, we’ve updated and curated our UMassD Collection with 50+ new images and assets to help visually tell our story.
University Marketing is dedicated to improving umassd.edu website performance. We recently launched several improvements to umassd.edu image processing to ensure optimal web performance across all devices and regions.
Truly responsive images
Images have been visually responsive on umassd.edu for best display on all devices; they scale up/down. Images on umassd.edu are now set to crop down to the best-fit for that particular device. Simply put: mobile device loads an image much smaller than a desktop computer. The result is better performance on mobile devices that suffer from slow internet speeds due to data plan or signal strength.
Image optimization
Optimizing images is all about balancing file size and image quality. Images are now optimized and resized in Terminalfour without the need to rely on content editors’ knowledge of image-editing software or compression methods.
Modern formats
Most images on umassd.edu are now processed as WebP. Using WebP, we can serve smaller, richer images that make the web faster. [source] If you are using an older browser, we have jpg available to display as a fallback. This all happens without the need for our content editors to engage, just upload your single jpg image, same as before.
Content delivery
Most of umassd.edu assets are now served through a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN serves assets from a location nearer to the visitor, speeding up the site and improving the overall user experience. Globally distributed CDN servers ensure that regardless of where your site is hosted, its assets will be served from a location close to your visitors.
Lazy loading
University Marketing recently upgraded our lazy load engine [source – Vanilla Lazyload]. Lazyload speeds up your web application by deferring the loading of your below-the-fold images, animated SVGs, videos and iframes to when they enter the viewport. You may notice some images fade into view as you scroll down the page, that’s Lazyload!
UMassD Marketing Department with the assist! Take a peek at just a few ways we helped promote the Men’s Basketball team’s journey to the Sweet Sixteen.
Thanks to our partners in Athletics and Public Affairs, there was plenty to share!
✅ Game coverage
✅ Student Story
✅ Graphics
✅ Marquee
✅ Post-event recap
✅ Streaming promotions
✅ Press Opportunities
⬆️ Where did it all end up? Social media.
View this post on Instagram
Web story by David James (now with over 500 views!).
We are locked and loaded. Ready for a full house. Let’s go Corsairs. pic.twitter.com/8ipDEvsOEN
— Frank Sherman (@fishermanh50) February 24, 2022
Significant improvements have been made to the university’s program searches in the last month. Using an updated module, the search can now filter more quickly and efficiently and with more filter options than previously. In addition to the search within ALL programs, we currently have searches isolated to Undergraduate programs and STEM programs.
Baselines
The Bristol Plus brochure targets incoming and transfer students, who are interested in receiving an associate’s degree at Bristol Community College, and later transitioning to UMassD to earn a bachelor’s. Through this program, Bristol students will have access to facilities on both campuses, including the library, fitness center, bookstore, and dining halls. With almost 20 undergraduate online degree programs, students can choose their ideal field of study.
20210110370-ADM-BristolPlus-BRO-LD-r8
Over the last two months (Dec. 20 – Feb. 20), Communications’ top five news stories were:
Targeted at incoming students, the Honors College brochure aims to inform students who are looking for an innovative learning environment that will engage and challenge them academically. Honors College classes provide first-year seminars, small group discussions, group projects and opportunities that will prepare students for graduate school or the job market. Honors students receive special benefits including personalized mentoring, enrichment trips, early registration, leadership roles, etc.
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University Marketing in coordination with Student Affairs launched a redesign of the UMassD Orientation website with a focus on usability by greatly reducing the number of pages into a more focused approach.
Even with proper training, individuals can still get stuck when editing their University websites. It is for this reason that the web department has created an online user guide for Terminalfour (T4), our web content management system, complete with the most commonly asked questions and tasks our users come across.
Some of the many subjects addressed include:
Since September, our ads have been served to prospective students and parents across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Google Ads, ConnectedTV, and more.
Our ads have served 5.7 million impressions and received nearly 40,000 clicks. Here’s the landing page.
This blog is to keep our campus partners up to date with new features and advancements within Marketing as well as to share marketing performance. We welcome your feedback and your questions.
See Communications’ latest 
